Miller says picking a top comic is nearly impossible because of the Loot Crate effect on the Big Trouble in Little China/Escape From New York comics, the effects of returnability and more. The #2 book is Civil War #1, but the periodical list is probably the shakiest, so it’s really a shame Diamond didn’t release their traditional chart.

However the top GN was easier to calculate and it’s Saga Vol. 6 with an estimated 47,968 copies ordered.

I don’t have time today to dig into these figures, provisional or not. However for you chart watchers, the Beat will be publishing Brian Hibbs’s annual Bookscan chart and updating the archives on all those columns.

Heidi MacDonald is the founder and editor in chief of The Beat. In the past, she worked for Disney, DC Comics, Fox and Publishers Weekly. She can be heard regularly on the More To Come Podcast. She likes coffee, cats and noble struggle.

The trend seems to be that Marvel + DC + Image account for about 3/4 of the market share.
If DC and Marvel do well, then Image does poorly, like 2016, where their annual percentage decreased from 9.93% in 2015.

I misapprehended what I was told about the process not having been completed; there was no intent on Diamond’s part to suggest that it WOULDN’T be completed. Which is not to say when or if it will be published — just that I misstated the case. I apologize for the error.

That’s in fact why I thought we might be done with Loot Crate entries a while ago, figuring others might follow the practice of not including Diamond in the supply chain for those copies. But it’s still a some-do, some-don’t thing.

“I misapprehended what I was told about the process not having been completed; there was no intent on Diamond’s part to suggest that it WOULDN’T be completed. Which is not to say when or if it will be published — just that I misstated the case. I apologize for the error.”

Diamond seems to be getting slower and slower on releasing monthly sales figures, so this comes at no surprise. It would be nice though, if they could separate actual sales to retailers from numbers from sources as Loot Crate as well as free overships, which have been the bane of poor Torsten in his search for the truth about such things.